Introduction: Our current model provides direct skills training for middle and high school age youth. Six summer camps a year can reach about 125 students. Although we’ll ramp up our existing model and directly train 1,000 young people (in parallel) by 2020, our collaborative recognizes the urgent need for a different approach. Even among New Mexico’s small population, systemic change and breakthrough socio-economic impact will not be achieved unless we can scale the program in a strategic way.
Cultivating Coders believe that teacher training holds great promise to do just that. By skilling up teachers and deploying them back to their communities to lead camps and after-school coding clubs, we expect the program’s sphere of influence to increase by a factor of 100.
Description: Cultivating Coders offers a six-week intensive boot camp-style training course focused on web application development fundamentals and technical training in a host of web development technologies. Upon graduation, teachers will return to their communities qualified to lead students through Cultivating Coders’ cutting-edge, project-based curriculum and after-school coding clubs. Teachers will be able to meet the needs of their students in their own communities.
Cultivating Coders is a multi-dimensional coding initiative that breaks down and crosses boundaries. Incorporated in late 2015 by Charles Ashley III, it stands out among similar coding organizations by taking world-class computer science education to rural and underserved high school students and geographies. Cultivating Coders raises funds in order to offer its boot camps free of charge, and then assigns qualified staff to support newly established after-school coding clubs.
But we’re not stopping there. Career pathways services are also provided to high-achieving graduates. These include opportunities to gain valuable professional experience through internships with leading tech organizations as well as opportunities to earn income through well-paid freelance work. Communities impacted in New Mexico in year one included Gallup, Farmington, Shiprock, and Albuquerque’s South Valley.
TechHire Partner, Obama Foundation Mentor, City of ABQ Education Committee and Learning Alliance Member
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